On this day

December 20th

Hunger

December 20, 2023

I’m intrigued by the word hunger. It can convey so much more than the simple hunger for food. It’s power begins to show when deployed as hunger for nourishment— Hunger for freedom— Hunger for power. For as long as I can remember I’ve struggled with body image. I feel like that’s a better way to convey the feeling instead of a more surface-level, “struggled with weight.” Only a precious few times (in my 50+ laps around ‘ol Sol) have things around me lined up, juust right, and I’ve found myself in a shape to my liking; Found myself in a shape that enabled me to do what I wanted.

Hunger isn’t in your stomach or your blood-sugar levels. It’s in your mind—and that’s where we need to shape up.

~ Michael Graziano from, The hunger mood

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The word I’ve been meditating on recently is ease. To avoid hunger (not just hunger for food, all the hungers) I must be in ease. Easy to say, impossible to do, but just maybe it’s be–able.

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Creative freedom

December 20, 2021

All that was left was the three of us. Our relationship and trust in each other. Hanging out and having very little to do. Waking up, having breakfast, smoking pot, buying some records, listening to those records, and maybe playing some music. We now had total artistic freedom. Nobody, including us, was wed to any commercial expectations. This gave us the creative freedom to make whatever we wanted, completely free from fear and expectation. In hindsight this was a huge gift.

~ Michael Diamond

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Ignorance

December 20, 2021

One can’t learn something new without first admitting one’s ignorance. No matter how great a tea is, none can be poured into a cup that is full of water or turned upside down. There is no trying without being ready to fail. […] Some people, out of pride, exclusively want to achieve; Some others are willing to learn. Guess who gets most done in the long run?

~ Vincent Thibault

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First anniversary

December 20, 2021

tl;dr: Yes, it really does work.

It’s been one year since I started collecting my thinking in a slipbox. In the photo, the box on the left is full of materials—blank slips, dividers, etc. The box on the right is the older portion of my collection of quotes; It’s the portion of the quotes which has been released as daily podcasts for the Little Box of Quotes. The center box is the meat of the slipbox and contains over 1,000 new slips, with about 250 of those being new quotes. But, enough with the statistics.

What can I do with it? A startling amount of interesting things come out. I’m not going to write up an article right here to prove it. But suffice to say I’ve recently been dipping into the slipbox to augment something I was writing. I’m trying to remember, any time I’m writing anything, anywhere to pause and ask the slipbox about it. When I do that, I almost always find something to add.

One really big question I had when I started the slipbox was whether I wanted it to be physical or digital. I’m happy to report that I made the right decision. So much of my life and things that I do are digital. I’m so tired of digital stuff. Any time I can be doing something in the physical world, that’s a plus. Never once have I regretted not being able to free-text search the slipbox. Instead, it remains a pleasantly tactile experience to search, retrieve, and create.

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More thoughts on knowledge management

December 20, 2020

Weeks ago, I wrote a number of posts about my quest for a personal knowledge system. (See my tag, Knowledge systems.) I’ve continued to think about this, and I’ve conducted a few more experiments. Today I want to unpack my thoughts about using a physical system.

I started into this quest with an open mind. Any physical system—slips of paper, note cards, etc.—will not have the features of a digital system. When thinking about “features” I’m imagining what that feature enables, if anything. So both types (physical/digital) capture data, but the digital system is easily searched, and so on. My thinking was that the digital system (there are actually several) had all of the features of the physical system, and I’d steered towards digital.

One misconception about digital is that it is more durable. I contend that physical slips, (3×5 cards, etc.,) are more durable. Nothing short of theft or a catastrophic fire endangers them. Digital, on the other hand I don’t trust at all—I know enough about how things really work, and I’ve seen enough problems in my 25+ years in tech. But I’d thought, “the digital system is the enemy I know,” and I thought I’d be willing to invest the extra effort needed to maintain the digital system. (Yes, I believe the digital system is more effort to protect and maintain.)

But I think the deal breaker on the digital side is a missing feature of the physical system: The ability to hold many notes in view at once. In a digital system, I’m limited by my display space. In a physical system, I can cover my desk, a table, the entire floor even, (I’ve done it,) with notes and sweep over it quickly. Short of a touch screen the size of my desktop, (have you seen the touch-wall in Minority Report? …jealous,) any digital system will fall short on this feature.

I’m left with one feature missing in a physical system: How to capture URLs. How do I capture links to resources on the Internet? I have an idea about that…

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The warrior sense of humor

December 20, 2019

Lastly, these remarks are inclusive. They’re about “us.” Whatever ordeal is coming, the company will undergo it together. Leonidas’s and Dienekes’s quips draw the individual out of his private terror and yoke him to the group.

~ Steven Pressfield from, The Warrior Sense of Humor

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This also ties into what makes a good team. I don’t mean hyperbolic imagining of the team as some military unit. Rather, plainly stating what lies ahead, what will be challenging, and what are the goals for the team builds cohesion. The more the team members understand each other, the better they can empathize. Only when there’s empathy—my ability to use it and your awareness that I can and do use it to better help and understand you—can the barriers of fear be removed; fear prevents people from asking for help and from asking how they can help others.

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A doorway from hell into your bedroom

December 20, 2018

If the devil were to create a doorway from hell straight into your bedroom, it would look a lot like an email app. While email is a valuable tool, it’s also a giant funnel into my consciousness. The single biggest change that helped me resist insomnia was to ignore work email when I get home.

~ Gabe Weatherhead from, Fighting the Insomnia Machine

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I banished the phone (and everything else) from the bedroom about a decade ago. If you have a television, your phone, your computer or anything else in the space where you sleep, I believe you are making a grave error.

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Programming sucks

December 20, 2014

Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro,1 you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”

System administration sucks too:

… And if these people stop, the world burns. Most people don’t even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn’t make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.

~ Peter Welch from, Programming Sucks

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hear! hear!

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Interview with Koichi Tohei

December 20, 2013

The way people most talk about ki these days tends toward the occultish, but I will say that I have never done anything even remotely involving the occult. Much of what Ueshiba Sensei talked about, on the other hand, did sound like the occult.

In any case, I began studying aikido because I saw that Ueshiba Sensei had truly mastered the art of relaxing. It was because he was relaxed, in fact, that he could generate so much power. I became his student with the intention of learning that from him. To be honest, I never really listened to most of the other things he said.

Stories about Ueshiba Sensei moving instantaneously or pulling pine trees from the ground and swinging them around are all just tall tales. I’ve always urged aikido people to avoid writing things like that. Unfortunately, many people don’t seem to listen. Instead, they just decrease the size of the tree in the story from some massive thing to one only about ten centimeters in diameter. In reality, it’s pretty difficult to pull even a single burdock root out of the ground, so how in the world is someone going to extract a ten centimeter pine tree, especially while standing on its root system? Such things are nothing but exaggerations of the kind often used in old-fashioned storytelling.

The stories have gotten rather incredible since Ueshiba Sensei passed away, and now people are having him moving instantaneously or reappearing suddenly from a kilometer away and other nonsense. I was with Ueshiba Sensei for a long time and can tell you that he possessed no supernatural powers.

~ Koichi Tohei from, «http://members.aikidojournal.com/public/interview-with-koichi-tohei-1/»

From, Interview with Koichi Tohei by Stan Pranin.

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